Thinking Allowed Folgen

Garden Utopias: Michael Gilson, Associate Fellow of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, takes Laurie Taylor behind the privet hedge, to explore the suburban garden and the beautification of Britain. How did millions of British people develop an obsession with their own cherished plot of land? Although stereotyped as symbols of dull, middle class conformity, these gardens were once seen as the vanguard of progressive social change, a dream of a world in which beauty would be central to all of our lives. Also, JC Niala, anthropologist, allotment historian and writer, discusses 36 months of fieldwork on allotment sites and guerrilla gardened streets across Oxford and suggests these are places where urban gardeners imagine, invent, and produce a hopeful future within their city.Producer: Jayne Egerton

Richard Sennett, leading cultural and social thinker and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, talks to Laurie Taylor. Growing up in a housing project in Chicago, he originally trained in music. An accident put paid to his cello playing and he turned to sociology. Over five decades he’s documented the social life of cities, work in modern society and the sociology of culture. His latest study explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It draws personally on Sennett's early career as a professional cellist and explores the dangerous and ambiguous nature of performance, from the French theorist, Michel Foucault's hypnotic lectures to the demagoguery of contemporary politicians. He describes the tragic performances of unemployed dockworkers in New York City in the 1960s, as they competed for a dwindling number of jobs, and Aids patients in a Catholic hospital doing a reading of As You Like It and displaying defiance in the face of death and religious disapproval. Producer: Jayne Egerton

Anonymity and self creation: Laurie Taylor talks to Thomas DeGloma, Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, about hidden identities and how and why we use anonymity, for good or ill. He explores a wide range of historical and contemporary cases, from the Ku Klux Klan to 'Dr H' the psychiatrist who disguised his identity in a meeting which changed his profession's regressive attitudes towards homosexuality. In recent years, anonymity has featured widely in the political and social landscape: from the pseudonymous artist, Banksy, to Hackers Anonymous and QAnon. What is anonymity, and why, under various circumstances, do individuals act anonymously? How do individuals use it, and, in some situations, how is it imposed on them? Also, Tara Isabella Burton, Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, on the crafting of public personae, from Beau Brummell to the Kardashians. She finds the trend for personal branding, amongst ordinary people as well as celebrities, originated with the idea that we could shape our own destiny, once the power of the church had waned. What are the connections between the Renaissance genius and the Regency dandy, the Hollywood 'IT' girl and Reality TV star? Might there be social costs to seeing self-determination as the fundamental element of human life?Producer: Jayne Egerton